Tag Archives: customer experience versus brand experience

Honoring the Toaster: The Ultimate Customer Experience Mentor

The humble but indispensable toaster

The humble but indispensable toaster

Being a consumer today is a lot harder than ever. How we do the things we need to do every day is changing at a dizzying pace. Simply interacting with all our devices, our car stereos, the ATM, stores, and even healthcare providers require us to learn and relearn the means by which we get the results we want. This learning requires an investment in time and energy, usually only to have an “upgrade” result in us having to start nearly from scratch. Usually the upgrades have the motive of simplification and/or added functions, but many seem to change for the sake of change… except the toaster.

When is the last time that you needed to relearn how to use a toaster? As an appliance, toasters are perfect in their functional transparency and clarity of purpose. They are comically simple. In fact, we take these wonders of the industrial age for granted.

When I think about approaching a customer experience challenge, I think about how I would “toasterize” it. Toasterizing requires some creative thinking in metaphors, but it can uncover what is providing a great experience versus what is superfluous and driving customers crazy.

Here are the reasons why I believe a toaster represents the ideal experience.

  1. It manages expectations. It says what it is and does what it says. An orange is orange, a fly flies, and a toaster toasts. Enough said.
  1. It cannot be easily substituted. If you don’t have a toaster, you probably will forego toast. Toaster ovens are overkill.
  1. The operation is intuitive. I think I was only shown how to operate a toaster once in my life and I did not have to be shown again.
  1. The inner workings are not mysterious. You can actually see the thing doing its job. The little wires inside get hot and look hot, and the bread turns to toast in front of your eyes.
  1. The process is sensorial. You can actually tell the moment the bread turns into toast by the toasty smell.
  1. The user settings are direct. Toast the bread longer for dark (or burnt) toast, shorter for light toast. If the toast is too light you can push it down for more time. If you burn it its your fault.
  1. The time it takes to do the job is consistent and reasonable. The sub-conscious knowledge of how long the toaster takes allows you to multi-task effectively.
  1. It does one thing and is not insecure about it. The toaster is one of the elite appliances that can set out on the counter full time, so it has a big ego I’m sure.

The toaster’s more modern cousin, the microwave, is indispensible but a horrible experience that is tolerated versus enjoyed. (Bring to mind any service providers you may have?). How does it work? What do the frozen dinner’s instructions require from me? Will this food now burn me when I open it or eat it? Add your other complaints here… Would you rather toast that dinner if it only took 2 minutes?

Improvements on the toaster are barely non-existent. Sure there are some fashion concessions, and I have seen one that burns a Hello Kitty face on the toast, but the inner workings are the same. The toaster has reached appliance nirvana.

For such a humble gadget, the toaster is a master at delivering what we want from it, and therefore has become indispensable. It delivers great value and we give it a place in our collection of must-have objects. I find that the toaster test is a great way to casually evaluate your experience on the 8 points above. Ultimately the toaster is simple and intuitive and a great experience role-model. So the question is… is your customer experience a toaster or a microwave?

Bill Chidley is a Partner and Co-Founder at ChangeUp. Creating Innovating Experiences that Drive Growth. http://www.changeupinc.com

Brand Experience versus Customer Experience: Twins Separated at Birth?


Natural Happy Girls

 

Is there a difference between Brand Experience and Customer Experience? The answer makes me think of stories about identical twins separated at birth and reunited many years later. Amazingly many have the same hair styles, similar jobs, and they like the same flavors of ice cream even though they never met. Why? Because they share the same DNA, which is more powerful than circumstance or environment.

 

BX…CX… What’s in a name?  In business today there is a lot of energy put toward managing either Brand Experience or Customer Experience. Based on my involvement with both I want to set the record straight on the key differences. Like identical twins they share the same DNA therefore they look and act similarly. With twins their differences are influenced by the families that raised them and may result from having different cultures and customs. Likewise Brand and Customer Experiences have different upbringing but their common DNA makes them overwhelmingly similar.

Regardless of nomenclature, experience management and innovation is strategically important to growth. What drives the difference between BX and CX are three things:

1. The Brand building versus customer service bias of the organization

2. How the differentiating and value adding aspects of the experience are inspired

3. How success of the experience is measured and tracked.

The initial difference is cultural bias. If the organization has a Brand driven culture, the bias is toward a Brand Experience mindset. If the organization has a customer service driven culture, the bias is toward a Customer Experience mindset. “Brand” is a complex idea that many organizations embrace but is not often codified, so in the absence of a clear Brand idea and proposition, strong customer-centric values are a fine substitute. Here either bias has a noble purpose. My client experience bears out that a great experience design can result from Brand or customer service scenarios.

 

Design inspiration comes next. Both BX and CX development processes involve journey mapping and seek to define touch-points and create value-adding and differentiating experiences. Both must bridge the digital and physical seamlessly, address a variety of segments, and accommodate different need states and occasions. They also seek to address problem resolution as a key opportunity to shine. Their DNA is the same. The difference is in inspiration. Brand Experiences look to actively and passively embed Brand-building into the experience whereas Customer Experiences do not have the same primary motive.

Brand-centric organizations have defined Brand attributes and an activation strategy (which should be based on data and customer insights). The experience design is an opportunity to leverage the power of the Brand strategy and build positive equity on specific attributes as intentional additions to the customer experience. This Brand building may not pay dividends immediately, but it is a longer-term investment that synchronizes with Brand messages in advertising and other Brand communications to build equity and brand salience. Alternatively, in the absence of a defined and pervasive Brand, Customer Experiences are focused more on delighting customers in the here and now. They must have core-tenants that are linked to strong customer-centric values. These have the net effect of a Brand, but they are not directly inspired by a defined Brand idea. It’s like getting to your destination using a map or by familiar landmarks. The important thing is that you arrived.

 

Success criteria is the ultimate differentiator of BX versus CX.  Brand Experience adds Brand-derived attribute tracking to the measurement. It all ladders up to the need to correlate attribute performance to business performance and see the effect over time on Brand sentiment. Ultimately both Customer Experience and Brand Experience measurement have “macro” metrics that inform Brand sentiment… like net promoter scores, defection rates, etc., but Customer Experience measurement may not include (or they just “throw in”) Brand related measures.

 

So the wrap-up is this: if you are asked to manage or execute an experience innovation initiative, don’t get hung up on semantics because the core DNA is the same. All Brand Experiences are inherently Customer Experiences, and all Customer Experiences result in a Brand Experience by default. Both put the customer at the center with insights and empathy as they seek to create proprietary experiences that foster enduring relationships versus mere transactions. The important thing is to be consistent or else the confusion could bog your organization down.